Assorted Upgrade Questions

We’re currently running FreePBX v2.5.2.6 on top of Asterisk v1.4.21.2

We’re looking to run some upgrades in the very near future.

I’m having trouble finding a clear indication of what versions of Asterisk are supported by what versions of FreePBX. Will FreePBX 2.9.x run on top of Asterisk 1.4.x? Or do we have to upgrade Asterisk to 1.6.x or 1.8.x?

It looks like the FreePBX upgrade process is fairly easy… I’ve got a module I can run in the FreePBX webUI. What about Asterisk? What does the upgrade process look like?

How messy is this going to be? Am I likely to break things when moving from FreePBX 2.5.x up to something newer?

What about when moving from Asterisk 1.4.x to something newer?

Absolutely any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

The first question is how was the system originally installed? Did you install from a distro or a base install from source?

Well, that is a good question.

The original install was done by my predecessor, and the documentation isn’t the best.

We’re running on top of CentOS 5.2, so I don’t think it was an official part of the distribution.

We do have a trixbox yum repository on that machine… Which may have been used as the initial installation source for Asterisk/FreePBX… But we certainly aren’t running trixbox at this point.

I’ve sent an email to my predecessor, we’ll see if he responds.

In the mean-time, are there any config files or logs I could check that would clearly indicate where the install came from?

No, not really. What is the output of uname -r? What is the output of ‘yum list’

Are there are files in /usr/src

Does the /var/www/html/maint directory exist (this is a sure sign it started life as a trixbox).

does /etc/trixbox exist?

Output of uname -r: 2.6.18-92.1.6.el5PAE

Output of yum list: wall of text
More output than I want to copy & paste. The only thing in there called “asterisk” is from the trixbox repository, and it is not installed. It looks like there are some Aastra packages installed… But we aren’t even using any Aastra phones.

Are there files in /usr/src ? yes
Including freepbx-2.4.0.tar.gz, asterisk-1.4-current.tar.gz, and an asterisk-1.4.21.2 directory containing the usual makefiles and whatnot.

Does the /var/www/html/maint directory exist? no

Does /etc/trixbox exist? no

Looking over the documentation, and the output you’ve asked me to generate… I’m thinking it was probably installed from source. He might’ve played around with trixbox, or maybe grabbed a few specific packages from that repository to make things easier… But it doesn’t look like trixbox was ever actually installed. Nor does it look like much of Asterisk or FreePBX came from a repository.

Looks like it was installed from source.

You could have run the yum list and stuck it in pastebin and provided a link.

Assuming you have the right PHP you can upgrade your FreePBX all the way up to 2.9 without issue.

Asterisk 1.8 brings much new functionality and I would strongly look at upgrading especially if you use queues.

Thanks for the information. Sorry for the slow response, I was out of the office yesterday.

Just tried to dump the output of yum list into Pastebin… Told me it’s too big. Apparently 500kb should be enough for anyone.

How messy is an Asterisk upgrade? Is it just a few rounds of “make clean” and “make install”?